About Me

Thursday, 14 May 2009

I'm worried I'm jealous of every humanbeing alive

My name is Gráinne Maguire, I’m 28 years old, I’m a stand up comedian and I’m also worried I’m jealous of every single person alive.I took part in a comedy for kids’ workshop and stand up show last weekend. It teaches stand up skills to extremely privileged London children. I don’t mean to be envious but when you hear an eight year old start a joke with “You know when you’re skiing and your au pair falls over...” a little bit of your soul can’t help but shrivel. On arrival, I was introduced as a fancy professional comedian and gave them all a “You can do it!” verbal high five. Standing there blinking in the mid day sun, donning my New Look best and last night’s gritty mascarared face, I faced this mini Bodean clad army feeling like a Nanny they had just found pilfering Mum’s medicine cabinet. Worse still was how gaspingly talented some of the moppets were. At the performance at the end, I followed an eleven year old comedian, so witty and talented, I actually heard my brain consoling myself that he had probably been going longer than me and that this was his crowd. And then it was my turn. Have you ever been booed off stage by a baying mob of over excited six year olds, vibrating with sugar? I have. Hen and Stag nights, I can just about manage but when a ten year old interrupts your set to shout “I have no socks”, it’s hard to think of a comeback. Jealousy is a feeling I’m used to; usually promoted by a battalion of magazines trying to sell me things. If it’s expensive, it’s an investment, if it’s cheap, you stock up on it, if it’s ridiculous waste of your money, it’s a splurge; nobody just buys anything anymore. The female body is a repulsive work in progress, that needs to be waxed, plucked, scrubbed and exfoliated or it will make men vomit on sight. How on earth the human race reproduce before the invention of body firming cream is a mystery. That’s why it’s a shock that Patron Saint of making the best of yourself Madonna is divorcing. She isn’t so much a woman as iron discipline in a wig. If we believed the magazines, her two hours in the gym every day, mind bogglingly restrictive diet and obsessive control over every aspect of her life must make her the happiest lil’lady in the land. Of course not. This is a woman worth £50 million who said her greatest indulgence in life was white bread toast with jam. Toast with jam? I have that every morning for my breakfast and I have a seven pound over draft. What a joyless existence it must be, to be that successful and still need to sweat two hours of your life away everyday in order to live up to other people’s expectations of you. It’s the actions of a woman frightened by like not in charge of it. All that work trying to look sexy and then allegedly, too tired to have any afterwards. Next time, you feel pangs of envy looking at her lyrca clad bottom, remember that, and put the toaster on. In other celebrity body news, Nicola Mclean “star” of “I’m a “Celebrity” get me Out of here” (quotation marks writer’s own) celebrated her “breasts” (sorry, I’ll stop now) first birthday. Her 32G mammaries are so bizarrely out of proportion on her tiny frame that they look like footballs attempting to escape from her person. In an interview, she giggled (I think Nicola probably giggles most things...I’ve just ran over your dog, our house has been repossessed, I’ve been diagnosed clinically brain dead) “I love giant knockers!” Giant Knockers? She is talking about her own body! The woman has obviously grown up solely on an intellectual diet of lads mags; her vocabulary is made entirely of words she’s learnt from Nuts magazine. She belongs to a generation of women so chillingly immersed in misogyny, they’ve internalised the sexist nonsense we had, we hoped left behind in the seventies along with home perm kits and being sacked because you were pregnant. Nicola obviously sees her own body entirely in the context of how men view it. What’s pitiful is the generation of young women who will compare their own normal breasts with McLean’s space hoppers and find them wanting. Nevermind that Nicola has probably lost all feeling in them underwent painful plastic surgery to achieve them, will never breast feed, suffer constant back pain and borderline sexual harassment from every man she ever meets until they leak and have to be removed- they’re sexy! Well they look sexy anyway and that’s all that matters.In other blonde news, Kate Moss is all set to launch Top Shop’s flagship New York store. It’s interesting to compare Moss’s tango with the tabloids with that other gossip favourite Kerry Katona. Kerry, officially the person you’re allowed to be vile about, was ridiculed for a pathetic This Morning appearance, where she seemed confused, emotional and in need of an early night, a pint glass of water and a bucket beside the bed. Instead, she was encouraged to give a life interview on national television by a sneering band of MTV producers gleefully filming the ensuing train wreck for their television show. When Kate Moss was exposed as a drug user the scandal transformed her from a fashion industry legend to national icon. Why the big difference? Well, while Kate, favourite with the glamorous, privileged fashionistas dealt with the scandal by swanning off to another party. Kerry, face of Iceland, cuts her coke with a Matalan loyalty card, just fell apart. Like any party you’ve ever been to, there is the girl doing shots that will still make it to work the next day and the one who after two Bacardi Breezers is crying in the toilets. It’s not what you do but what you look like that counts, like everything with women in the public eye. And that’s why I’m so jealous and depressed. I should have finished with that at the kids comedy club. It might have got a bigger laugh.